


Beginnings and Meetings

by Emjen_Enla



Series: Prompted Works [38]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Drabbles, First Meetings, Gen, I don't know how to tag this, Pre-Raven Cycle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26097280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: Everything starts somewhere. Or Gansey Week 2020.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III & Declan Lynch, Richard Gansey III & Original Character(s), Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III & and Richard Gansey II
Series: Prompted Works [38]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1366669
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12
Collections: Gansey Week 2020





	1. Day 1: The Pig

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so I haven't done as good a job at writing fics for this in advance as I did last year, so here is a collection of drabbles instead.

When Gansey met the Pig, it was a memory of bygone glory days gathering dust in the garage of one of Henrietta’s numerous senior citizens. Gansey didn’t yet have his license (which was different than saying he couldn’t drive but that was another story) so he’d taken to going on long, winding walks around town scouting out locations for his mini-Henrietta. On one such walk he’d seen the Pig sitting in a driveway so he’d come over to look and he and Mr. Jones—the car’s owner--had struck up a conversation. Mr. Jones was lonely and Gansey loved a good conversation with an interesting person, so he started visiting all the time. However, as the months went by, Mr. Jones’s health began to fail him and his children decided to move him to a nursing home.

“I want you to have the Camaro,” Mr. Jones told Gansey.

“I can’t do that,” Gansey protested.

“I want you to have the car,” Mr. Jones repeated, offering the keys in a way that booked no argument. “I’d rather you have it than someone I don’t know.”

Gansey stared at the keys. Already, he loved the Pig and the chance to own it sounded like a dream. “I’ll buy it from you,” he said. “How does that sound?”

“I won’t take money from you,” Mr. Jones said. “I want it to be a gift. The car deserves someone who will love her after me.”

“I’ll pay you for the car,” Gansey insisted. “I can afford it.” This was sort of crossing a line—he and Mr. Jones pointedly didn’t talk about the fact that Gansey went to Aglionby—but it seemed appropriate now. “I can’t just take the car from you.”

In the end, after the same conversation happening over multiple visits, Gansey managed to convince Mr. Jones to let him pay for the Pig. Gansey bought the car on a lovely day a month and a half before his sixteenth birthday, but Mr. Jones just handed him the keys and Gansey wasn’t going to say no to the chance to finally drive the car he’d been drooling over for months.

Plus, the look on Ronan’s face when he saw Gansey drive up in the Pig for the first time was totally worth it.


	2. Day 2: Monmouth

From the moment he decided to attend Aglionby, Gansey knew he didn’t want to live in the dorms. Aglionby had nice dorms, but they were still dorms which meant that you had to deal with things like sharing a bathroom, roommates you may or may not get to choose, and all the shenanigans teenage boys got up to with no parental supervision. Gansey had been a teenage boy with no parental supervision for years by this point and the novelty had long since worn off; he had no desire to share space with a pack of boys for whom it hadn’t. Henceforth, another living situation was in order.

Still, he didn’t find that living situation right away. He lived in a hotel for the first few weeks of school until he stumbled across an advertisement announcing an old factory for sale and the rest was history.

“You’re going to live here?” Ronan asked, the first time Gansey brought him to Monmouth Manufacturing. “This place is kind of a dump.” Then he grinned in the sunny way he’d later lose along with Niall Lynch. “It’s awesome.”

Gansey’s parents were less enthusiastic. “The place is a dump,” Richard Gansey II said, one of the only times Gansey allowed them to visit him in Henrietta. “You put too much money into fixing it up and you won’t make any profit when you sell it.”

Gansey didn’t know how to tell him that he hadn’t bought Monmouth with future profit in mind. He’d bought Monmouth because of the feel of the place, because the old, broken down building somehow felt like the kind of person Gansey wanted to be. It was the sort of place where he could be the person he’d spent most of the last few years chasing across Europe.

Monmouth was the kind of place which could be home, or at least as close to home as Gansey had ever had.


	3. Day 3: Cabeswater

Since being given his life back by Glendower, Gansey had spent his life chasing magic. Over the years he got good at concealing it behind historical interest—prattling on endlessly about ley lines and dead Welsh Kings somehow still alive and able to grant wishes did nothing to convince people you were normal and Gansey had been told repeatedly as a child that if you couldn’t manage to actually be normal you had to at least grant other people the curtesy of pretending to be normal—but that didn’t change the truth of it. Despite however many interesting historical facts about medieval Wales he spouted the search was ultimately about magic, it was about being able to ask why. He needed to know why he’d been saved, and to do that he needed to find Glendower.

Gansey had seen magic before Cabeswater. After all, he’d dedicated years to the search for magic and Gansey was good at finding things. He was very persistent which was perhaps even more helpful. So, yes, he’d definitely seen magic before Cabeswater, but somehow Cabeswater was still different. Perhaps it was the scale—the small oddities Gansey had found over the years paled in comparison to a mystical forest of talking trees—or perhaps it was the fact that Cabeswater seemed to be for them—to talked _to them_ —perhaps it was both or some other factor Gansey hadn’t thought of. No matter what the reasons were, it was different.

The night after they discovered Cabeswater, Gansey didn’t sleep. He tried, but his mind wouldn’t stop racing. After a while he quit trying and got up. Ronan appeared to actually be asleep for once, so there was no one to make a midnight run for orange juice with, but that was alright. This was different from Gansey’s normal insomnia. His skin felt electrified with excitement. It was actually happening. He was actually getting somewhere. He had actually found something. He wasn’t making it up. Glendower was real, and magic was real and everything he’d heard that hot day with the wasps was real. He was vindicated.

In the face of this triumph it was easy to ignore the recording of his own voice speaking on the Ley Line on Saint Mark’s Eve.


	4. Day 4: Aglionby

Gansey applied for and enrolled at Aglionby Academy without ever actually seeing the school. He also didn’t return from Europe until three days before the fall semester started. Between the required family things one had to do after returning home after years away and jetlag he didn’t actually manage to visit campus for the first time until the day before classes started.

That first day on campus Gansey was wandering around with a sheet of paper with his classes and locker number trying to figure out where everything was.

“Do you need help?” Gansey turned to see a well-dressed boy smiling a politician’s smile. He looked very much like Gansey’s family which was not comforting. It was just a reminder that he was back in the same sort of place he’d managed to escape when he’d gone to Europe.

“Yes, I’m new,” Gansey said plastering on his “Play Nice, Gansey” smile. He held out his hand. “I’m Gansey. Nothing else. Just Gansey.”

The other boy took his hand. He had a firm, politician’s handshake to match his politician’s smile, the part of Gansey that had internalized his parents noticed. “Declan Lynch,” the boy said. “Nice to meet you. Can I help you find something?”

Gansey didn’t really want to spent his time Playing Nice, but really he didn’t know where he was going so he smiled again. “Sure, I’m mostly looking for my locker,” he showed Declan the paper.

“Sure,” Declan said with his politician’s smile. “Right this way.”

So far Aglionby was turning out to be exactly what Gansey had been expecting.


	5. Day 5: Henrietta

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sigh...so this was actually written yesterday and should have been posted on time, but I wrote it longhand and one thing led to another and I wasn't able to type it up until this morning, so here it is a day late. Hopefully I'll get something written and up for Day 6 as well today.

A couple hours before Gansey met Declan Lynch while wandering lost around Aglionby campus, he entered Henrietta for the first time.

Though when Gansey first brought Aglionby and therefore Henrietta up to Helen he couched Henrietta, Virginia like it had been his plan before she’d ever brought up coming home to Play Nice for his mother’s political career, it had actually been a split-second decision. Sure, Henrietta had been _an_ option on the list of places with Ley Line convergences nearby, but it had not been his first option, namely because it would require him returning to the US, which he hadn’t wanted to do.

Why ultimately, when Helen had shown up asking for him to come home, had he actually done it? Probably it was because while his parents had been asking him to come home for years, they’d always done it over the phone. Regardless of Helen’s protests, Gansey knew their parents had sent her to bring him home. If they were getting to the point where they’d send his sister after him it was only a matter of time before they resorted to using his status as an unaccompanied minor wandering across the world to drag him home against his will. He’d been counting on his parents not wanting to cause a scene to make sure he was allowed to travel without interference, but if they were getting to a point where that wasn’t enough of a deterrent he was best coming back on his own terms.

So, he chosen Henrietta. He hadn’t really had any idea where he wanted to go anyway. Ever since he’d fled England without saying goodbye to Malory he’d been spinning his wheels, uncertain of where to go next. He’d gone to France mostly because he had to go somewhere and when Helen had shown up he made the same decision about Henrietta.

Henrietta didn’t look like much, but then again most magical places didn’t look like much in Gansey’s experience—if they had they probably would have been discovered by nosy outsiders more easily. Unfortunately, that meant that he still didn’t know if he was onto anything in Henrietta or not. He thought a convergence was the right place to be, but was Henrietta’s convergence the right one? He had no idea. All he could do was hope he hadn’t resigned himself to making no progress for the rest of his time in high school.

Fingers crossed as the saying went.


	6. Day 6: Ley Lines

The first time Gansey ever set foot on a Ley Line, he was thirteen years old and two weeks into his Europe trip.

By that point he’d known about Ley Lines for years, but there were none close enough to his parents’ house for a kid his age to get on his own. This was annoying because there actually were Ley Lines fairly close to his home, just not close enough for a kid with no driver’s license. It wasn’t until he’d escaped to the wider world away from his family that he finally got to actually visit a Ley Line for the first time.

The experience was much more lackluster than Gansey had hoped. Over years of desperately dreaming of being able to visit a Ley Line, Gansey had built it up in his head, which was perhaps unsurprising for a child as single-mindedly focused as Gansey was, but also a set up for disappointment.

In Gansey’s daydreams he set foot on a Ley Line for the first time and some huge and obviously magical happened and put him directly on the path to finding Glendower. Obviously, that didn’t happen. He set foot on the Ley Line and not much happened. Perhaps the texture of the air changed a little, but that could just as easily have been him desperately wanting a sign of something magical.

Gansey went back to his hotel that day bitterly disappointed and wondering if everything he’d done to get here was in vain. Perhaps he would have been better off staying at home and accepting that the voice telling him that he’d been saved by Glendower was just a hallucination. Perhaps it really was a fool’s errand.

The next day, Gansey didn’t work on his search at all. He went out and did normal touristy things. While he saw the sights, he thought. He thought about booking a flight and going home. He thought about turning his trip into a real vacation and abandoning his quest. He thought about the voice which had called out to him as he lay dying amongst the wasps. The next morning, he got up early, bought a set of dowsing rods on the internet and payed for next day delivery. Then he gathered up his journal and most useful books on Ley Lines and headed out to the Ley Line again.

Ultimately, he knew he couldn’t let this go until he knew the answers.


	7. Day 7: Journal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well...I actually managed to get all seven days. Believe me, I'm as shocked as you are. Hope you all enjoyed.

Gansey’s journal was actually a series of journals, lovingly filled one after another and saved as the years went by. The first iteration of the journal wasn’t even a journal at all, just a spare composition notebook he hadn’t needed for school. Of course, it wasn’t like the Ganseys couldn’t have afforded to get him a nice leather journal like the ones he would later have, but Gansey’s therapist had told his parents not to indulge his “Glendower fantasy” and that if they just forced him to stop thinking about he would eventually forget about it altogether.

They didn’t have any grasp of how difficult it was to keep Gansey from thinking about things. That was practically his default state and already his universe revolved around finding answers for what had happened to him that day with the wasps. He quickly realized that if his parents weren’t going to allow him to explore the mystery openly he was going to have to do it secretly. That was no easy decision to come to for a child like Gansey who had been a serial people-pleaser and therefore had no experience with disagreeing with adults or lying to them. But some things had to be done in the name of answers.

So, the first volume of Gansey’s journal was a composition notebook. So was the second one, and the third. The fourth was an actual journal from a great-aunt who’d been under the impression he was constantly writing in a diary. After that he was in Europe and could buy any journal he wanted and the journal took on the form it would later have.

By the time Blue met Gansey, he actually had a box of filled journals that he referenced whenever he needed them. They were a record of his search stretching back over the years.


End file.
